10 Brilliant Marketing Stunts That Put Startups On The Map

Monday

Aug 4, 2014 at 8:55 AM

Alyson Shontell

A strong marketing stunt can be a valuable tool for any company. Last week, Microsoft employees released a ridiculous "Sexy And I Know It" parody featuring the Surface tablet, and despite the horrible lyrics and dancing, it actually made the Surface look sort of cool.

But Microsoft — and even the Surface — already has a defined image. No matter how the video turned out, Microsoft would still be Microsoft.

A startup has more to potentially gain from a successful marketing stunt than any other kind of company. Without defined brand images in the minds of consumers, some clever PR can easily turn a fledgling startup into a superstar brand in a matter of weeks.

Tinder visited sororities and their partnering fraternities on campus and devised a master plan to get tons of signups.

Tinder cofounder Whitney Wolfe ventured to college campuses with a clever plan to onboard thousands of users. According to Bloomberg Businessweek's Nick Summers, Wolfe scheduled meetings with sororities and then their corresponding fraternities on campus. Sororities typically have a favorite fraternity or two on campus that they plan social events with frequently, so Wolfe made sure to hit both chapters back to back.

From Summers:

“We sent her all over the country,” Munoz told me this week. “Her pitch was pretty genius. She would go to chapters of her sorority, do her presentation, and have all the girls at the meetings install the app. Then she’d go to the corresponding brother fraternity — they’d open the app and see all these cute girls they knew.” Tinder had fewer than 5,000 users before Wolfe made her trip, Munoz says; when she returned, there were some 15,000. “At that point, I thought the avalanche had started,” Munoz says.

GoldieBlox created a viral video about getting young girls into technology. It got 3 million views in 2 days and caused a lawsuit.

GoldieBlox CEO Debbie Sterling is a Stanford-educated engineer who produced the popular video to the hit Beastie Boys song "Girls."

The lyrics spoke to an issue about too few women being interested in technology from a young age. Here are some of the verses:

Girls to build the spaceship,

Girls to code the new app,

Girls to grow up knowing they can engineer that.

Girls.

That's all we really need is Girls.

To bring us up to speed it's Girls.

Our opportunity is Girls.

Don't underestimate Girls.

The video was watched more than 8 million times. All the attention attracted a lawsuit between the Beastie Boys and GoldieBlox over rights to the music. It kept GoldieBlox, an interactive game company few people had heard of, in headlines for weeks.

Here's the video.

Mailbox was one of the first apps to stir up demand by creating a wait list, which grew to more than 260,000 people.

Mailbox, an email app that sold to Dropbox for ~ $100 million 37 days after launch, built hype for the product by creating a virtual wait list.

The demand grew to more than 260,000 pre-launch signups by first creating an intriguing teaser video that promised to help people reach a desirable inbox zero.

Then, blogs like TechCrunch went wild. That's when Mailbox announced a brilliant "reservation" scheme to keep the hype going and waited an unnecessarily long time to launch. Here's the video that was used to hype up the app.

Fixed is an app that helps fight parking tickets for citizens of San Francisco. It has a bunch of volunteers, called "ticket heroes," who trek across the city in search of cars that have been fined. The ticket hero will then leave a Fixed-branded report card on top of the ticket, so when the driver comes back to his or her vehicle, it's clear what service they can use to avoid paying the fine.

Another smart marketing scheme Fixed employs: It uses the Mailbox-famous waitlist for cities in which Fixed hasn't already launched. If you want to jump to the top of the waitlist, Fixed will let you. You just have to share the app with all of your Facebook friends first.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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